[CF-Devel] png<-> xpm 24<->32

[Mark Wedel]

 As a note, this can also be done in the server distribution -

 If we can identify what png's are resized xpm's (and thus pretty ugly),it is
easy enough to make non expanded (yet resized) png's in the distribution that
look better.

 What I mean is that you take the 24x24 xpm (which looks good), and turn it into
a 32x32 png, with the 24x24 data centered (so you have 4 border pixels).  Doing
this should be quite easy - just some pipes of data through the pbm toolkit.

 The problem is identifying the bad png's.

 I will note there is a good many of png's that are 32x32 and look really good -
David Sundqvist did some work on those.  It would be a shame to lose those.

 As a note, at least on the unix client, the image data the server sends to the
client is only relevant in that the client can understand it and make it some
form of drawable.  Whether it be png or xpm, what the client gets a hold of it
and renders it, it all becomes and xpixmap no matter what the original source. 
So the idea of at least the unix client getting a xpm and converting it to a png
makes no sense, so all it will do is take that png and convert it to an xpixmap,
so why not do that with the xpm in the first place.

 So to restate:
 We need to identify what pngs images out there are scaled up xpm's that would
look better as non scaled xpm's and make the change.

 As for the perspective (iso) images:  Its a mixed bag - I agree that for some
objects and monsters, the flatter representation would look better, as it is
clearer.  But for some things, like buildings and walls and some other objects,
I think the perspective view looks nicer.

 The preferance probably depends a lot on the size of the image (perspective on
single space objects doesn't work because generally it results in not much
visible area), and also how quickly you need to identify it.  Being able to
identify that the shop is a weapons vs armor shop in an instant isn't very
demanding, but being able to identify monsters quickly (say from a fairly
harmless one compared to a nasty spell caster) is pretty important.